Gallery

Friday 8 June 2012

LOTRO: A week full of raiding


New recurring topic

This is the first post of (hopefully) a range of posts concerning end-game in Lord of the Rings Online. I've been wanting to write about my raiding adventures for some time now, but I could never find the right format to do so. To be honest, I'm scared that I'll bore you to death with it. I'm targeting for a raiding news post (can be long, can be short) each one or two weeks on Thursdays, as that's when the locks have reset - so you'll know when to avoid this blog at all costs read up!

What you cannot expect:
Nice high quality screenshots of Tower of Orthanc. I have to put my graphics on medium in order not to lag in raids, so you end up with a quality such as of the picture above. If I'm doing something involving fog or waterfalls (Acid, Shadow, Saruman - sigh), I might even need to put my settings on (very) low. Also, perhaps contrary to expectations, I'm not the "Sorry to wipe your raid, but I got these amazing screenies!" type of girl. Much to the unconsious delight of my fellow raiders.

What you can expect:
Long, boring summaries of raiding events. Okay, I'll try to keep it to a limit. I am aware of my inability to write short, to-the-point posts, though. If I really get out of hand, feel free to let me know. That counts for any advice, actually: I'm always happy to hear what you'd like to see.


Three chicks awaiting a Saruman slaughter. 

This week's raiding news

This is good as any week to start off, and in fact, the past week was an insane raiding week for me. Just to be clear: I don't raid this much each week! Here we go:

Thursday - Acid T2
A great start of the raiding week by actually making Acid T2 for the first time. I was on rune-keeper, killing a troll with my boyfriend on champion. The other troll add was being done by another RL couple, also on rune-keeper and champion, which I thought was fun. We failed the challenge, though, because some people got caught in the acid shower (sigh), but I'm still feeling happy we made it. Such a difference from the end of March. It wasn't even that hard in the end. It was extra fun because we are the first of my server I know of who did it without stacking burglars (we only had one), although I guess that tells more about the size of my server.

Friday - Draigoch, Fire & Ice T2
First I brought my captain to a Draigoch run with friends, and she could get the last piece of her set, the head piece. Extra healing from Healing mark, hurray! In the evening I did Fire & Ice with my kinship, which was smooth as always.

Saturday - Lightning T2
I usually don't raid in the weekends, but this time my boyfriend and I promised to help out a befriended kinship. They have cleared all of the Tower of Orthanc on T1 but not anything on T2 yet. The first two trash pulls went remarkably well, but the third one was a horror. They had never come that far, though, so people were really fanatic and wanted to complete it. Two and a half hour later (it was getting 2am) we finally gave up and were going to take one last go. So we made some fun, popped some useless cooldown skills (racial skills, Dunland clicky + shout "For Honour, Duty and Love!") and ran in... and made it right away! It was brilliant, but sadly enough we found out that aggro swapping between warden and champion on the boss was not doable (there were no guardians available). I heard later that "For Honour, Duty and Love!" made it into the kinship message of the day.

Sunday - Shadow T2
We had some good tries on Shadow T2 challenge following a new strategy. We didn't make it yet, but the new strategy seems to work out well since DPS was very high. Even with my DPS'ing on rune-keeper. This was promising and much fun.

Monday - Nothing
Can you believe it? Nothing! We were supposed to go Saruman with the befriended kinship of Saturday, but the login server failures destroyed that idea. As my friend said: "Saruman gets to live one more day..."

Tuesday - Saruman T1
My boyfriend and I completed Saruman with the kinship of Saturday. I took my captain and it was great to have the deed done on her. I'll now really have to start thinking about which ToO and which Ettenmoors pieces I'm going to get on her (I'm aiming for three pieces of each).

Wednesday - Saruman T2/1
And we fought Saruman again! This time with my own kinship and I was on my own old lore-master. First some T2 tries in which we got further than ever, which was very cool. I love the coordination and concentration involved in this fight. I also love dazing stuff, so I'm totally at my spot here. The only downside is that my computer lags horribly whenever we get a frost environmental phase. When it became late, we completed T1 to get people sorted on alts.

Well, that certainly was a hell of a raiding week. It won't be that much each week, I promise! Hopefully I'll find some more time for non-raiding stuff and SWTOR the coming week.

6 comments :

  1. WOW! You are full of Raid-y goodness! Congratulations on so many wins!
    I'm excited to read all of your blog back issues! :)

    I definitely voted for you on the NBI Awards. Love your blog and layout. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Awwws, that's really nice of you, thanks a lot! It's good to hear I'm on the right track.

      You congrats on your victory, that's real cool! :D

      Delete
  2. Cool post! I'd definitely read a sequel. How's your kin doing in T2 nowadays?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi there! Seems I'm really bad at recurrent topics, somehow as soon as I tried to start one, I failed miserably. Cool t hear you're interested, though, I might put another one up soon. :)

      We got Acid T2 now and are very close to Saruman T2. What kinship/server are you on? And do you raid a lot? :)

      Delete
  3. I'm with Infamy on Brandywine. We've got Acid & Lightning T2C, F&F T2. Working on both Shadow and F&F T2C--we need to pick which one to focus on. RoR is looming close.

    Basically, I raid, run instances, and try to make my characters perform roles that are not ideal for their classes (tanking captain, DPS warden. Not T2 effective, but fun). And I make outfits here: platemetaljacket.blogspot.com

    Yeah I went browsing LotRO blogs last week and stumbled upon yours. So like, from my point of view you didn't fail at your recurrent topic because it's only been a week since the last update I saw.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cool to meet another raider. :D

      The thing I don't like that much about F&F Challenge is the amount of burgs needed to make it... at least looking at the kins that have done that. I generally don't like stacking burgs, it's just boring. Shadow is also really hard, though. I missed it when my kin took it down. :( I love the Saruman fight, although it can be a bit luck based. Reminds me of Gortheron T2 back in the days. Have you had any tries on him, yet?

      And I get what you mean with those roles. I quite like to main heal three -mans on lore-master, for instance, but lately I've only been logging in to raid and check the festival.

      Delete

You can insert links, images and videos to your comment using these tricks.